Will NPR Snobs View Trade School Graduates As Cultural Equals?

NPR’s All Things Considered posted an article 4/25/18 titled “High Paying Trade Jobs Sit Empty While High School Grads Line Up For University”.  

Students should be encouraged to consider these occupations if they are naturally imbued with mechanical aptitude.

However, the sorts of leftwing elites that gravitate towards NPR need also be asked a question or two regarding their own promotion of this alternative career path.  

Should students pursue a trade school rather than the academic route, will the biases of technocrats result in a sort of caste system where those not credentialed in the liberal arts or higher science backgrounds NPR types prefer as their equals be excluded from weighing in on cultural concerns?  

Punitive sanction might be imposed upon any daring to raise a voice beyond the narrow concerns of their servile guild craft.

In the olden days, this used to be looked down upon as articulating opinions above or harboring aspirations beyond one’s station.

Already teachers look down upon parents that raise concerns seen as infringing upon a profession that the parents have themselves not been schooled in.  

It must also be noted that many of these trade jobs are highly paid because they are quite frankly labor intensive and often downright dangerous.

So what will be done with those pushing into their late 40’s and early 50’s whose bodies are worn out by that point but who do not have the academic qualifications to move on into work considered more white collar in nature?

Sure the pay is good when one is able to bust one’s back.   

But soon as the back is busted, some of these employers are ready to toss aside workers that barely missed a day the previous twenty years if the employee is unable to return to the job full steam ahead a month after surgery to repair injuries aggravated by these glories of proletarian labor advocated by this vanguard that hasn’t lifted a finger at all.

By Frederick Meekins

Municipalities Take Aim At Basic Liberties

The town of Deerfield, Illinois has enacted a regulation banning assault weapons.

Those violating the ban could face fines of up to $1000 per day.

Will progressives that tossed a fit over Sheriff Joe Arpaio taking it upon himself to enforce the national immigration laws that the federal government refused to get as worked up over mere town ordinances contradicting what might be allowed under state and federal law?

What other products otherwise perfectly legal in a state might municipal aldermen take upon themselves to ban?

For motorist safety, what if a town decided to forbid residents from owning compact automobiles that rolled off the assembly line after a given year since in traffic accidents such vehicles often have about as much structural integrity as the average soda can?

What, if in order to protect pedestrians, a town passed legislation insisting that smartphones present such a threat of distraction that it is not enough to restrict when these devices can be used but that these gadgets must be banned altogether within the boundaries of a specified jurisdiction?

While we are at it, if local authorities possess the power to ban products deemed legal by the state granting the municipality the right to exist in the first place, why not certain behaviors or even relationships?

 For example, if the representatives of Deefield, Illinois insist that if those electing them to office want to live in a town without firearms it is their right to do so irrespective of how neighboring jurisdictions might decide to order their own affairs, on what grounds then should some backwoods enclave be forbidden from retaining laws against sodomy or promulgating a decree refusing to accept the validity of gay marriage?

By Frederick Meekins

Ingraham Insufficiently Deviant For Leftists To Defend Her Speech

The world has about come unhinged over Fox News pundit Laura Ingraham for daring to poke a little fun at a petulant youth known to excoriate with the vilest of profanities those reluctant to embrace his policy proposals demanding the abandonment of centuries of constitutional theory deemed fouler than his acute potty mouth.

The font of deliberative political contemplation, GQ Magazine, has posted a column in support of the Ingraham boycott titled “Boycotting Ingraham Is Patriotic”.

Yet those assenting to this sentiment are the very sorts of thinkers that would condemn the Census for tabulating how many within the boundaries of the United States are actually citizens.

But if it is inappropriate to classify who is and is not of a particular jurisdiction --- the most basic of functions in establishing the foundations of a nation/state --- isn't the concept of patriotism --- the idea that a set of principles in large part derived from a particular geography inhabited by a specific sort of people is superior to all others --- even more verboten?

GQ is celebrating the decentralized justice inherent to a boycott as about the purest form of free expression imaginable.

After all, consumers are not obligated to bestow their funds upon someone advocating a set of values that they find abhorrent.

Likewise, Ingraham is not entitled to be lavished with these funds.

Interesting, though, how amongst postmodernist hordes this realization is a one way street.

For would the editorial staff of GQ Magazine as eagerly applaud a boycott organized by a Christian cabal seeking to impose their particular ethical idiosyncrasies in a way that would implement comprehensive revolutionary change across the entire culture even if a significant percentage was still not amenable to such a fundamental alteration of the social compact.

After all, those now threatening social upheaval are the children of many who denounced Pat Buchanan's culture war oration at the 1992 Republican convention.

At the time, opponents of the pious populist insisted that absolute objective values did not exist and, even if they did, it was not the place of cultural institutions to advocate on behalf of or to enforce a hegemony of values.

Of Lady Ingraham's status within the ongoing civic discussion, the enlightened archons of GQ assure the unsettled of weak mind, “Laura Ingraham remains as empowered as ever to impart her bad takes, whether to viewers on Fox News or to passer-bys on the street, without fear of being arrested by agents of the state.” But for how long?

Already the right of free expression --- deliberately enshrined among the first protections of the Bill of Rights --- is restricted in the presence of those seeking an abortion --- a procedure that honest jurists are compelled to admit cannot be found clearly delineated anywhere in this charter document but rather only in interpretative penumbras of it.

In the case of Lara Ingraham still enjoying her innate liberties as a free citizen despite being economically inconvenienced, how is that less of an outrage than the gay couple denied the wedding cake by the Christian baker?

In the transaction dragged before the judicial system, no one prevented the couple from the state granting its official recognition of their unnatural liaison.

The only thing they would have had to have endured was the search for a baker willing to provide it, which would have cost considerably less that the advertising revenue rescinded from Fox News.

So why are some forms of speech worthy of protection and some not the part of the most vociferously insistent that the most egregious imposition imaginable is to somehow insist that someone else's truth might not be quite as true as initially suspected?

By Frederick Meekins